And what really gets me is that overall, the American public seems to think this is a good idea… And what’s worse, even if they didn’t, there doesn’t seem to be any political way to convert America to a single-payer public system. Who could someone even vote for to make this happen? It makes me incredibly mad and incredibly sad at the same time, and now that I’m actually caught up and victimized by it, it’s really upsetting personally as well. That said, I also have a minimum of $500 a month in prescription fees for my own medical problems… I know that’s not much, but it still has to be paid, because for some bizarre reason that I can’t figure out, in Canada prescriptions — which are legitimate and unavoidable medical costs, right? — are not covered (neither are eye appointments, glasses, or dental appointments, but that’s a whole new debate).

Anyway, more positively, I was able to pay these bills quickly to a large extent because of sales from my Etsy store giving me a small fluid float of cash that I was able to quickly send down to Rachel to appease the doctors. One of the thing that makes it all even more offensive to me is that the hospital was refusing to do potentially life-saving scans without 80% of the fees being paid up-front. I know that almost every American I know can tell me a horror story that’s a million times worse than what I’ve just described, but still, this should not happen in a so-called “first world nation”.

Thank you again to everyone who has supported my Etsy shop. And it may surprise you to hear me say this but thank you as well to everyone who has continued to support BME after I left since ultimately that money does at least partially support my daughter. But I wanted to mention, in positive news, that I made some very cool new additions to my Etsy shop (especially in the zombie rings category because I’ve improved some old designs with new stone-mounting skills I’ve learned) that I wanted to mention here. As always, my “PAY WHAT YOU CAN” policy remains in place, where you can optionally apply up to a 50% discount if you need it. As much as it’s important to me to make money to, among other things, pay medical bills, it’s also important to me as an artist to get my work into (or “onto” in the case of rings!) the hands of people who appreciate it.

Click the pictures to jump to the relevant shop page:

Blue Zombie Eye Ring
Whoever heard of a blue-eyed zombie? Made using a chrysocolla.

Moonstone Zombie Eye Ring
That’s more like it… looks like an ethereal cataract!

Mummified Zombie Ring
This gaunt character has a pair of pyrite (fool’s gold) eyes.

The Brainiac Maniac Zombie
Caitlin’s exact words: “THAT RING IS PSYCHO!!!”

Half-Head Zombie Ring
I’ve used a pair of glossy 8mm black onyx cabochons as eyes.

Malachite Jester’s Mask Ring
This itsy-bitsy ring is for the daintiest fingers I make stuff for.

Lego minifig with Star Ruby
Since people keep asking, I made another one…

That’s all I added today, but I actually made much more than that because I had some commission work and orders to put a final polish on as well, so it was a busy but successful day. I think I’m pretty good at channeling stress into productive labor, and I can’t imagine a bigger thing to worry about than the well-being of my daughter.

Anyway, I managed to find a copy of Discovery’s incredible “Race to Mars” (aka “Mars Rising”) six part series (there is a barely-alive torrent and the DVD is for sale on their website) and it’s been absolutely wonderful to watch and very on topic with my latest post about the planning of Mars missions up to 1967. That said, one of the problems with having so thoroughly educated myself on the history of various proposals is that I noticed a number of minor historical errors in an otherwise well-researched documentary series — for example using footage of Ernst Stuhlinger’s US Army Ballistic Missile Agency solar-electric mission presented to the public by Disney (the ten ships carring two hundred people were very pretty, looking like giant mechanical flowers) but describing it as von Braun’s equally preposterously massive 70 person, multi-ship mission imagined in the 40s. But wow did I enjoy it and so will anyone who dreams of humans breaking free of the Earth and colonizing another world (…and then another, and another, and another…).

I have in the past complained that I think Elon Musk charges too much for Falcon 9 launches at $54 million, due to my support for “big dumb boosters”, low tech mega-rockets. But in some ways I am revealed as being too hasty when I read about his “Red Dragon” proposal and other Mars ideas. But I want to introduce some thoughts before I discuss them.

When you ask Americans what NASA’s budget is, the average response is that it’s about $750 billion (which they believe is too high). The reality is that NASA is massively underfunded, currently at $18 billion, and as a percentage of the budget it has dropped every year. Additionally, they are cursed with a repeating fiasco of one President scrapping all of NASA’s current plans and announcing his own “bold” (or in Obama’s case, decidedly not bold) vision, only to have it again scrapped and replaced by the next President. The end result is that not only do the scientists and engineers and astronauts live with a constant cloud of disappointment, it also results in massive amounts of wasted money. That said, it is very important to point out that NASA is one of the few US agencies that actually operates at a huge profit because of the technology they develop and inject into the private sector, to say nothing of secondary benefits like keeping high tech jobs in America. Most studies have shown that every dollar invested in NASA pays off in the long term by an order of 5:1 or more. But it seems like nothing is changing and any politician who has the appearance of being a “fan” of space development — Newt Gingritch comes to mind — is teased mercilessly for it. America’s aggressive pro-stupidity prejudice against intelligence is deeply ingrained.

But perhaps this new phenonmena that has been discussed a lot in the media lately of financially successful nerds of the tech sector lining up to invest in the tech sector will change things. Paypal, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google executives (and many others) are all pouring them money into space startups, with Paypal’s SpaceX being perhaps the farthest ahead. I just described Obama’s space policy as “decidedly not bold”, and that’s because it’s incredibly slow, expensive, and cautious. The long slog he proposes to get us to Mars will take thirty plus years and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It’s ridiculous. But as I mentioned in the previous entry, the smallest Mars mission that NASA has ever proposed came in at about $30 billion. The private sector though, which seems to be the future of the space industry, believes it can do better.

The Red Dragon mission (pictured above) that I mentioned earlier is an unmanned mission to Mars by SpaceX. It uses their Dragon capsule, which is capable of carrying astronautics, but for this mission is run roboticly. Elon Musk is telling NASA that he can do this mission for a scant $400 million, plus another $150-$200 million for the launch (using his Falcon Heavy, which is about half the size of a Saturn V). It’s an exciting mission because not only is it cheap enough to make funding very likely, but it will not only be searching for life, but also assessing surface habitability, research the ground ice (which is not just interesting for researching the climate history, but also essential in colonizing Mars), test many systems required for manned landing and do research on in-situ resource utilization. It’s the first Mars mission that’s a big step toward a real manned mission. So I was very excited to read the artical about Elon Musk in the December 17, 2012 New Scientist:

“Must would like to be the person who takes humankind to Mars.

That moment may be closer than anyone thinks. Musk declared recently that he could put a human on Mars in 10 to 20 years’ time. It is a remarkable claim, yet even more astonishing Musk tells me that he could do it for $5 billion, and possibly as little as $2 billion — a snip when you consider that the International Space Station (ISS) has cost at least $100 billion to build and operate, or that $2 billion is roughly the cost of launching four space shuttle missions.

Musk doesn’t just want to stop at one human. In his Heinlein prize acceptance speech, he said he wants to put 10,000 people on Mars. Musk rarely makes public statements merely for effect but a call for 10,000 would-be Martians is extraordinary, even by his standards. When I query him on this point, he pauses. Is he reconsidering? Yes… byt as with so much else about Musk, not in a predictable way. “Ultimately we don’t really want 10,000 people on Mars,” he says, after letting the pause linger a few seconds more. “We want millions.”

If he really can do it for that small an amount of money, I really hope they give him a shot. And if NASA won’t, maybe the private sector will. Whoever gets there first effectively owns the planet. He also goes on in the article to point out that on his launches, only 3% of the cost is fuel. He wants to see “rapid reusability”, whereas I’ve voted for extremely cheap rockets, but he makes the important point that when you’re talking about Mars, reusable (read: durable) technology is extremely important, since it’s not like Earth where you have highly accessible and long-refined raw materials and an established manufacturing sector. The Falcon Heavy, his new vehicle, has more emphasis on rapid reusability than anything he’s built yet.

Of course as much as I said I just want to make it through the summer at the start of this entry, I would really much rather make it long enough to see humans on Mars.

There’s a wonderful and award winning series called Locke & Key (published by IDW — you can also find them on Amazon, and I wouldn’t mention that if I didn’t think they were worth paying for) about a group of kids whose New England mansion has a bunch of keys with various supernatural powers, from doorways that can take you anywhere, to keys that can flip your gender and keys that open your head so you can rearrange your — or someone else’s — mind, to locks that protect us from a demon filled world desperate to spill into ours. I really can’t recommend it highly enough. I’ve read every issue and anxiously await the next. I should mention that it’s not suitable for children though.

To my great surprise, in the fourth series (out of five so far) — Clockworks — issue three contains a touching commentary on tattoos and self-harm. The main comic is written by Joe Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez, but occasionally they run a short mini-comic at the end called “Kinsey’s Komic Korner!”, Kinsey being one of the characters in the main story. That said, it’s all totally unrelated to the main storyline of Locke & Key so I think what’s going on is the authors are simply fans (perhaps I should say Kinsey is a fan) — these mini-comics are done by Kate Leth of Kate or Die, and you’ll also find this comic — and many more wonderful short illustrated stories — in her comics archive at KateOrDieComics.com (including some others about tattoos that all of us will find familiar).

(CLICK AND ZOOM IN)

By the way, Kate Leth mentions that it “scared the living hell out of me to put on the internet”, so I wanted to give her a lot of credit for doing so, and sharing something that makes one feel very alone even though it is an extremely common issue.

Speaking of time, since that seems to be the theme today what with birthdays and chronovisors and clocks, I think it’s pretty cool that devices like the iPhone can be hacked to act as remarkably accurate heartbeat monitors. I have two apps on my phone using two different techniques to achieve this. The first has you hold your finger over the lense of the camera, and then turns on the camera’s flash/light which causes the finger to illuminate. The phone then watches for the subtle changes in colour as the blood pulses through your finger to measure your heartbeat. The other app is analogous, but instead of using your finger just watches your face, which apparently pulses and fluctuates in tone enough with each beat of your heart that the little camera chip in the phone can actually detect your heartbeat, and from my testing it appears to be very accurate, which I have to admit surprised me. I’m guessing then that there are many animals capable of seeing this in humans and other critters.

My heartbeat is generally a healthy mentronome-like 60 BPM or just slightly below. About a two years ago it was slower, about 45 BPM, but I think it might have been my previous medication artificially slowing it down. Anyway, I actually installed this software because I was curious what effect my central apnea had on my heartrate, if any, since I assume they’re both part of the autonomic nervous system. I was somewhat disturbed to see that when I am having an issue with central apnea, my heart rate becomes highly errattic, fluctuating wildly and quickly and chaotically between 30 BPM and 100 BPM for a few minutes, and then settling back to its normal clock-synchronized tick-tocking… I have so much stuff I still want to do and see, so I really hope I don’t die in my sleep (or while I’m awake) some day soon, although I have to admit there have been many nights where I feel extremely off-balance in terms of my basic bodily functions and worry about it. I’m not at all afraid of dying and I have had a wonderful life, but I’d really rather have quite a bit more of it! (That said, ask me during my most painful periods and I think I might be more inclined to give you a “just let it end NOW” answer, haha).

Anyway, I just shipped all my pending Etsy shop orders and now it’s time to get cleaned up so I’m ready to go out for birthday sushi with Caitlin. I am, as almost always, covered in manufacturing grime and in dirty clothes, and I’m also a little more dirty than usual from getting Caitlin’s 1973 Mach I Mustang (a previous birthday present) ready for summer driving — although she is considering trading it in for something smaller, more modern, and more practical.

In addition to things like a secret mission to Mars that I talked about yesterday, a tale I enjoy is that of the Chronovisor, a time-viewer said to be capable of tuning in to lingering electromagnetic radiation and displaying any point in time on a television-like screen.

The story of the Chronovisor (if you speak Italian you can watch what appears to be a show about it here on YouTube) was first publicized by Roman Catholic priest Francois Brune, who had interviewed its alleged creator, scientist and fellow priest Father Pellegrino Maria Ernetti. Ernetti had a legitimate academic career as a respected expert in ancient music — so he had a lot to lose academically for telling crazy tales — and was also a prominent exorcist for the Vatican — so on the other hand, maybe crazy tales and Ernetti had always gone hand in hand. In any case, one day while working with Father Agostino Gemelli at the Catholic University of Milan working on hardware to filter harmonics out of Gregorian Chants, they thought they heard the voice of Gemelli’s father coming out of the device. Theorizing that just like a telescope allows you to “look into the past” by showing you light that was created many years earlier, or a “live” television broadcast may actually be showing you something that is not happening at that moment but seconds in the past because of delays in the electromagnetic signal reaching the viewer, that somehow their device had accidentally picked up on an “echo” of an event from the past, Ernetti began investigating the possibility of applying this phenomena in a more dramatic fashion. He claimed that he assembled a team of a dozen scientists and engineers including Wernher von Braun (presumably due to his alleged experience with the “Nazi Bell” machine, particle accelerator meets dimensional gateway generator, that some believe jumped through space and time from 1945 Germany to 1965 Pennsylvania) and Enrico Fermi (the Italian physicist central in developing the first nuclear reactor) to create the device, which worked as designed. However, the Vatican and the science team felt that the machine’s ability to completely eliminate privacy and to tune into any moment and any place put the world at far to much risk and dismantled it.

Before dismantling the device though, Ernetti claimed to have viewed many historical and biblical events, and when asked for proof of the device, he first provided the text of Thyestes, an unpublished play by Quintus Ennius from 169 B.C., which he said he transcribed while watching it in Latin on the Chronovisor. Most academics call this text a fraud, but it’s difficult to prove that absolutely. However, he followed this up with more dramatic proof, a photograph of the face of Jesus Christ as he was being crucified, which he said he’d created by photographing the screen of the Chronovisor!!! Of course, as an atheist, who does not even buy the notion of a non-supernatural historical Jesus, his is where the story breaks down for me. And unfortunately it also breaks down here for Ernetti, when in 1994 it was realized that the photo bore a remarkable similarity to a wooden sculpture of Christ for sale at the Sanctuary of Merciful Love in nearby Collevalenza, Italy. During his life he refused to comment on this matter, until on his deathbed — at least according to an anonymous letter sent to Brune’s publisher, from someone claiming to be Ernetti’s relative — he admitted that the photo of Christ was a hoax but that the Chronovisor was real and had worked.

Brune personally did not believe this letter, and as a devout Christian assumed that the similarity of the sculpture to the photo was due to the fact that the sculpture was said to be based on an actual vision of Christ, so “of course it looks the same, duh!”. I lean in the other direction, and my version of the conspiracy says that if the Chronovisor worked, it revealed the falsehood of the Christian religion — and of all religions — to Father Ernetti, who in a desperate attempt to hold onto his wavering faith, created the fake photo of Christ.

* * *

Because of my enjoyment of the Chronovisor story, it was with great interest that I read a recent article in Popular Science titled “In New Quantum Experiment, Effect Happens Before Cause“, referring to a brain-bending article in Nature Physics called “http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys2294.html“.

Using four photons, we can actively delay the choice of measurement—implemented through a high-speed tunable bipartite-state analyzer and a quantum random-number generator—on two of the photons into the time-like future of the registration of the other two photons. This effectively projects the two already registered photons onto one of two mutually exclusive quantum states in which the photons are either entangled (quantum correlations) or separable (classical correlations). This can also be viewed as ‘quantum steering into the past’.

In short, one team does something, and the other team checks its effect to see what they did. The brain-bender part comes in when you find out that the “results” part comes before the “doing” part, or at least appears to. There have been a few experiments that at first appeared to violate classical causality (the notion that cause must precede effect on the timeline) but were later shown to not quite be so physics-shattering. The jury is still out on whether this experiment involves actual “time travel” or at least Chronovisor-esque “time viewing” or not, but it’s possible, and every month a new experiment comes out that seems to take us closer and closer to retrocauality and viewing through time.

The part that made it really exciting to me was learning that defense contractor Lockheed Martin had patented and has been developing (with some DARPA funding) something they call Quantum radar (there’s a relatively accessible research paper you can read on it called “Remote-Sensing Quantum Hyperspace by Entangled Photon Interferometry“). As I understand it, it’s a viewing device that at a minimum allows you to instantaneously view any place — so a remote-sensing device that can over potentially massive ranges and through intermediate matter view whatever you’d like. In addition to the military applications that Lockheed Martin is investigating it is being considered for applications such as giving advanced warning of solar flares to better protect satellites and electrical grids. However, the research paper points out that using it as a geography-unlimited viewing device is only the tip of the iceberg, and that it should be possible to use it to “remote-sense distant quantum properties of past, present or even future hypersurfaces of spacetime … by exploiting causal and relativistic loopholes”. That is, it is quite literally the Chronovisor, a device that can show you any point in space and time. And Lockheed Martin wants to build it…

Oh what will the Vatican say about that?

Quite a while ago she gave me permission to use her wisdom teeth (appropriate for her reaching a “wise-old age”) that have been sitting in a jar of alcohol since she had them yanked out. So for a birthday present I spent some time welding and carving metal (this is all hand-formed, not cast like most of my rings) into a ring that holds the tooth along with a pair of moonstones.

Here are four more pictures of it:

Click click to zoom.

Sorry for my lack of posting recently. I keep meaning to make these long rambling entries like I did yesterday but I just haven’t for one reason or another. I expect at some point I will have a lot to say about the Chronovisor and time-viewers because the potential reality thereof has been on my mind (and I assure you they are more real than Mars missions, unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at it). And I’m happy to say that it’s only a month until my daughter is back for the summer and that always gives me lots of excitement to write about.

** Speaking seriously for a minute, yes, it is crazy. Unlike Moon bases, which were developed extensively by both the Army and the Air Force in the 1950s, Mars was never eyeballed by the military nor are there even dubious military applications for the planet. I can construct a logical fantasy that convinces me that there was a secret Moon program and like I said, we know there was — for example Project Lunex which the Air Force intended begin construction by 1967, and even earlier, the US Army’s Horizon Lunar Outpost which they wanted to begin in 1965 and have operational by 1966, beginning with a staff of twelve men. Kennedy scrapped both of these secret programs when he replaced it with the Apollo Program scientific PR exercise. As a point of trivia, the Apollo program cost $200 billion in 2012 dollars ($19 billion per moon landing). The US Army budgeted their Horizon Outpost of 1966 as costing $43 billion in 2012 dollars. Since I’m sure you are wondering how accurate this estimate might be, I will mention that NASA only went over their Apollo budget by less than 20%, so their estimates weren’t terribly unreasonable. The Air Force’s Lunex was a slightly bigger base with a staff of 21 airmen, and they figured their base would cost $54 billion in 2012 dollars. I’m assuming these figures do not include operational costs, but even if those sound like big numbers, if you assume that in 1965 the US had a population of 195 million, and about 65 million of those were taxpayers, then you only need a $100 a year from each of them if you spread the investment over ten years, and that doesn’t include corporate taxpayers. It’s not hard to hide those kinds of dollars amounts in a budget as large as the US’s — for example, in 2010 the Pentagon publicly committed $50 billion to classified projects, and that doesn’t even count money that gets moved under the table. And hell, with the size of the military spending in general, it’s very easy to hide things — after all, the Iraq war cost the United States at an utter minimum $800 billion and climbing (and that number is arguably $3 trillion or higher).

End of speaking seriously**

When we review modern Mars mythology, the first mission that needs to be mentioned is the joint German-Japanese mission using a large Haunebu III dreadnaught. Quoting from Half A Century Of The German Moon Base 1942 – 1992 by Vladimir Terziski (of the so-called “American Academy of Dissident Sciences”):

According to the authors of the underground German documentary movie from the Thule society, the only produced craft of the Haunebu-3 type — the 74 meter diameter naval warfare dreadnought — was chosen for the most courageous mission of this whole century — the trip to Mars. The craft was of saucer shape, had the bigger Andromeda tachyon drives, and was armed with four triple gun turrets of large naval caliber (three inverted upside down and attached to the underside of the craft,and the fourth on top of the crew compartments).

A volunteer suicide crew of Germans and Japanese was chosen, because everybody knew that this journey was a one-way trip with no return. The large intensity of the electro-magnetogravitic fields and the inferior quality of the metal alloys used then for the structural elements of the drive, was causing the metal to fatigue and get very brittle after only few months of work. The flight to Mars departed from Germany one month before the war ended — in April 1945.

It was probably a large crew, numbering in the hundreds, because of the low level of automation and electronic controls inside the saucer. Most of the systems of the craft had to be operated like these on a U-boat of that time — manually. Because the structurally weakened tachyon drives were not working with full power and not all the time, the trip to Mars took almost eight months to accomplish. An initial short trust towards Mars was probably used the strong gravitational field close to Earth, after th at the craft was “coasting” for eight months in an elliptical orbit to Mars with its main drives turned off. Later trips to Mars by the joint Soviet — American craft in 1952 and by the Vatican craft of the Marconi project from Argentina in 1956 reached Mars in only two to three days, because their drives were working during the whole flight: accelerating in the first half and decelerating in the second. Smaller Kohler converters were probably used to power the systems and life support equipment on board. I do not have any information at the present time about any artificial gravity capability on board the craft, but that could have been easily done with the large anti-gravity drives of the ship.

After a heavy, almost crashing landing, the saucer slammed to a stop, damaging irreparably its drives, but saving the crew. That happened in the middle of January 1946. The crash landing on Mars was not only due to the crippled tachyon drives of the craft — it was also due to the smaller gravitational field of Mars generating less power for the tachyon drives; and also due to the thinner atmosphere on Mars, that could not be used as effectively for air breaking as the Earth’s atmosphere could. The craft was shaped as a giant saucer — a form that is very efficient as an air brake, when it is entered into the atmosphere with its Huge cross section perpendicular to the trajectory of descent.

Holy techno-babble and Black Sun fantasies Batman! As fun as those stories are, I would be shocked-beyond-shocked if there’s a bit of truth to flying saucer trips to Mars by the Nazis let alone the Vatican, but it’s worth mentioning because it’s the earliest and best-established secret Mars mission in the chronology. But outside of there not being a shred of evidence for any of the story, perhaps more importantly, the underlying technology simply doesn’t exist, and is very far removed from everything we believe could exist. As advanced as German aerospace was, unfortunately they are no more likely to have succeeded at true space travel than Jules Verne. They both had good ideas — after all, the space guns been shown to be a workable and highly efficient technology capable of launching mass into space for a fraction of current costs — but couldn’t realize them any more than Leonardo da Vinci could actually build a helicopter even if he could think it up. The Russians also gave serious thought to Mars missions starting with MPK in 1956, but since they never figured out how to make the N1 (their heavy lift rocket equivalent to America’s Saturn V) do anything other than explode, they couldn’t lift enough mass into space to launch a Mars mission no matter how badly they wanted to and how much time they spent at the drawing board.

The Americans on the other hand actually did have the technology to get to Mars, so in their case it’s much easier to fantasize because you don’t have to imagine them doing something arguably impossible like in the case of the Soviets or the Nazis. In the late 1967 there was a government document published called The Report from Iron Mountain (which may or may not be a hoax — the fact that President LBJ tried to have the document suppressed and major figures such as John Kenneth Galbraith — who you may remember was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000 by Clinton — have supported its legitimacy suggests it is real, as does its prophetic nature) which concludes that war or a substitute for war is required for governments to maintain power, and that true peace is not in the interests of the economy. The report recommends creating “foes” for the public to fight, terrorism and illegal immigrants for one portion of the populace, and out-of-control pollution (ie. global warming) for the remainder, and to conglomerate wealth into the controlling classes in order to bring back a socially acceptable modern version of slavery. Sounds familiar? Just a hoax, don’t worry. Don’t listen to me anyway, I have a big lump of calcium building up in my brain and can’t be trusted.

A related report went further and predicted that these plans would eventually fail, and that the powerful and wealthy elite needed to put in place a set of three alternatives in the case of a social apocalypse. “Alternative One” called for the elimination of huge parts of the population, with the catastrophe to be blamed on either terrorism or pandemic. “Alternative Two” called for the building of immense underground bunkers, to protect the ruling class in seclusion while the surface population thinning was happening. Finally, “Alternative Three”, in case of a major catastrophe on Earth, called for moving a “Noah’s Ark” cross-section of the population to underground bases Mars as a survival colony. The documentary based on the book that revealed this — first claimed to be real, then claimed to be a hoax, then claimed to be real but using re-created footage — was aired in 1977, and it included what was said to be footage of a 1962 landing on Mars to scout for this underground survival base.

Gotta love the bit at the end (starting at about 1:47). Sure beats Apollo 18. If that video breaks in the future you can download it here. There’s so much great kookiness to find on this subject on YouTube, whether it is the the so-called Wikileaks footage of a grey alien (local copy), leaked footage of astronauts exploring an ancient base or city on the far side of the moon (local copy), or leaked footage of a human or humanoid female mummy found on the moon (local copy). How does anyone get anything done?

Anyway, lest I distract myself again.

Even though the author was quite clear it was fiction, the conspiracy community ate it up, Mae Brussel saying on her saw that “she’d had the shakes for weeks” and called it “the most important book I’ve read in many, many years”, others calling it “grey disinformation”, and readers writing him letters with comments like “you told the truth, but now you’re terrified to admit that truth because you’ve been warned off by the CIA”. I won’t waste too much time pointing out how silly this conspiracy is — after all, you have to imagine a radically destroyed and inhospitable Earth to believe that Mars is an easier place to live on!!! I also think that 1962 is rather ambitious for a Mars mission by the Americans, even with Russian help (as “Alternative Three” was said to be an international effort). If you’re wondering, in most telling the Mars part of conspiracy ends with this first visit to the red planet. I guess they came to their senses and decided it would make more sense just to enslave the 99% a la The Report from Iron Mountain.

Perhaps you’ve already done the math in your head and know that by my math, the earliest it’s actually conceivable for a Mars mission to have occurred is 1972 — forty years ago this year. I believe “Alternative 3″ is fiction, and I don’t think that it’s possible that we could have landed on Mars prior to the seventies, but at this point it at least becomes possible. As to why, well, I can’t think of any reason to do it and keep it secret other than the government having a genuine worry that the public missions (for example Viking in 1977, which sent back photos of Cydonia, the famous “face on Mars“) were going to find something destabilizing, and about the only thing that I can put on this list is alien ruins on Mars. There are a lot of people who believe they are there. If you are one of them, well, your circumstantial evidence for a 1970s Mission to Mars expands. On that note, let me post what is alleged to be leaked footage of the 1972 mission to Mars:

Moving out of conspiracy and fantasy into the real world now…

Planning for a Mars Mission began in 1948 with Von Braun’s plans which he presented to the Americans in a series of iterations in 1952 (with a crew of 70, probably the largest and most ambitious mission ever proposed!), 1956, and 1969. There was easily as much excitement and as much serious planning for 1970s Mars missions as there was for 1960s moon bases. In addition to Von Braun’s missions, generally involving convoys of ships based on rocketry he’d initially designed for the Nazis at Peenemunde, which were presented in popular mainstream magazines of the time, another early proposal was presented to the public by Disney in 1957 (but initially created for the US Army Ballistic Missile Agency), Ernst Stuhlinger’s massive but beautiful ion-engined ten-ship mission to Mars.

None of those missions ever had a budget estimated, and even though Von Braun’s proposals did get more conservative over time, they were all extremely expensive and required a lot of launches to lug an incredible amount of hardware off the planet. Incidentally this is one of the reasons I’m so excited about asteroid mining actually starting up — the possibility of manufacturing all this equipment outside of Earth’s gravity prison. Addressing this launch issue, Boeing proposed building a new massive launch vehicle capable of lifting everything required for a Mars Mission, slated for arrival at Mars in January 1972, in a single launch, bringing with it not just simple exploration equipment, but gear for the start a permanent base and settlement including a nuclear reactor to be installed on the surface of Mars. Also in 1960 and also slated for a 1971 launch, NASA did their own in-house study which used existing launch vehicles (the Saturn V, which most Mars missions from that point on used) but new nuclear propulsion systems and was the first to seriously consider radiation exposure issues. A few years later, in 1963, NASA designed a second version of this mission using traditional chemical propulsion systems.

Most of these missions are “true” missions to Mars where there was a stay on the planet’s surface, but both the Americans and the Russians also studied the possibility of flybys (the first Russian flyby, using only a small ship and only a single N1 launch, included a flyby of both Mars and Venus, as did some of the US proposals). In 1962 NASA asked for proposals for three contractors, the smallest being a long rotating craft (to create artificial gravity) from Lockheed. It was small enough to be put up in two Saturn V launches, but NASA actually was encouraging the contractors to design on the heavy side because they were looking for an excuse to fund the Nova booster, the planned follow-up to the Saturn V. General Dynamics under visionary Krafft Ehricke went much bigger, as big as many of the missions designed to set up bases on Mars, and needed four times as many Saturn Vs — eight — or just two Nova launches. It actually went into orbit though, and there was some possibility of a lander even though it wasn’t officially requested. Aeronutronic was in the middle, lifting its equipment with a single Nova launch, intended to be on its way to Mars in July 1970. Three years later NASA had Douglas design a flyby mission — they saved some development money by using their Manned Orbiting Research Lab space station as the basis for their hab module. Also in 1965 NASA did an in-house profile for a fly-by using existing Apollo hardware to save costs — bits of the moon ships, launched by the Saturn V (over six launches). It would not have been easy for the crew of three to stay sane with two years in such a tiny little vehicle! Even though the moon landing was yet to happen and America was completely enthused with space, the insiders could read the political writing on the wall and after so many glorious missions had been scrubbed, at this point the Nazi Peenemunde crew — Heinz Koelle and Wernher Von Braun — and their American compatriot Max Faget pointed out that if they didn’t pull a rabbit out of their hat soon, “we’ll never see a Mars expedition in our lifetime.” The very last flyby mission was proposed in 1966 by NASA in-house, the JAG Mars Flyby, a small tight mission requiring only four launches and existing hardware, but it was also not to be.

By the way, if you’re thinking that if you aren’t going to land, you might as well just send a robot, it’s important to note that half of all the robotic missions sent to Mars have failed, maybe it’s not entirely hasty to have a human along after all.

Returning to manned missions, also in 1963, TRW developed a Mars mission that added both aerobraking and a Venus gravity assist swing-by to the equation, saving a great deal of fuel weight, although the oddest thing to me about this mission was that it budgeted only ten days on the surface of Mars which seems a little disappointing to me — little more than a flag-planting opportunity, although perhaps that was a sign of the times. I’ll mention that during this period NASA had a lot of companies working away on smaller pieces — for example, it was expected that Ford Aeronutronic would provide the lander. A year later, Philip Bono, who had previously headed up Boeing’s earlier Mars and lifter proposal, was now at Douglas where he had another giant launch vehicle, the Rombus with a payload of almost a million pounds, but still required eight launches to lug up enough equipment to set up a base on Mars and stay there for the nearly year-long surface stay mission.

The best launch windows sat at the start of the 70s — which is when this last “leaked” video is from — but in 1964 NASA also considered a series of “UMPIRE” (Unfavorable Manned Planetary – Interplanetary Roundtrip Expedition) profiles for 1975 and 1977 where the planetary alignment was not as expedient — after all, if Mars actually became a target for humanity, it was conceivable that regular missions would be needed. Convair developed a long 800-1000 mission believing only these were feasible, but Douglas thought a nuclear rocket could get there in 200 days even in less-than-favorable conditions — not only that, but their highly cost-conscious six person mission was able to bring everything up in a single Rombus booster. In 1966, after NASA had spent some time seriously considering the less expensive flyby-style missions, they developed the FLEM profile, which was a flyby that “dropped off” a lander that aerobraked. Amazingly they managed to get this mission down to 118 metric tons, small enough to fit the entire thing into a single Saturn V launch. If any Mars mission could have been done as a black project, this is it.

Two last missions were considered in 1967, which along with the FLEM profile were the closest to actually being selected for execution. The first was the MEM mission by North American which took a four person crew to Mars using three Saturn V launches and three smaller Saturn I launches, all using modular and relatively well-established and well-understood technology, allowing them to give an accurate cost estimate of $27 billion in 2012 dollars. Also that year Boing proposed the larger IMIS mission, which took a crew of six to Mars. Boeing estimated a budget of almost $200 billion, although this covered the development and two sets of hardware and support for two missions to Mars, not just the first one.

Finally, I must include a longer version of that video of the mission to Mars, showing much more of the crew’s footage. Was it the FLEM mission?

Be sure you watch to the very end.

In 1967 Congress officially pulled the plug on Mars and committed itself to leaving Apollo as a PR win over the Russians and walking away from large, ambitious, manned exploration of the solar system. Did a mission happen as a black project? I wish I could believe it did. Going from the 1945 Nazi mission to the NASA missions of the 70s, you have a sliding scale of preposterous to extremely unlikely. But even without black fantasies, we came so close… So all I can do is be sad about how severely we humans have misappropriated our money. Almost none of these Mars missions that I’ve mentioned were ever formally budgeted like the Moon bases were — the 4-person MEM mission, I remind you, was budgeted at a scant $4 billion in 1967 dollars, or $27 billion in 2012 dollars, so that gives you at least some ballpark — but no matter what you can bet the numbers are no higher than a month or two of war. It really breaks my heart every time I think about it.

I do hope that if we go, we go to stay. One way trips. Pioneers!

By the way, when it comes to that final video, I’m quite certain that last little bit was forced there by the CIA. Now I have a great documentary called 2001 I’m going to go watch about (to tell the embarrassing truth I’m watching Top Gun, one of the best pieces of military-industrial complex propaganda since Goebbels). It’s about that time we went to Jupiter. Let a guy dream.

Click the picture to see it on my Etsy shop (or get it).

In Toronto it wasn’t too big a deal. They just made me step through the “nudie scanner” that takes an x-ray-type picture of you and shows a vaguely naked picture to someone in a closed room. Since that scanner showed nothing of consequence, I was just let through without anything else. However, in Richmond flying back to Toronto it was much more aggressive. They dedicated four agents to me the entire time, and the senior agents used it as an excuse to “train” the juniors.

They began my putting me in a little roped off area where they asked me basic questions about who I was and where I was going and filled out a page of information about me. Next I took off my shoes and jacket and emptied my pockets and put my stuff through the normal x-ray machine, while I walked through the “nudie scanner” (the only option for everyone). This scan showed my pony tail and strangely, an object on my left thigh, which was a complete malfunction. They immediately checked my pony tail and patted my leg to confirm there was nothing there, and I thought at first that would be the end of it, but they told me I was going to get an “enhanced patdown” and offered to do it in private. I told them I would rather do it in public. It seems to me that you give up a lot of personal safety when you go into a private room with authority figures!

The agent started explaining the search to me and I told him I’d had it done many times before and he didn’t need to, but it was “procedure” (oh, they love procedure), so I had to listen to his long explanation about how he was going to go up the inside of my leg with the back of his hand until he “encountered body resistance in the groin area” (a very boring way to refer to the scrotum). The search was very thorough, touching me absolutely everywhere, with a couple of very obvious omissions.

I will use this as an excuse to update you on my leg pocketings or macrodermals (here is my initial post on them and the first update if this is new to you). To remind you, these are done using 0ga (7/16″ diameter) silicone posts with a flared bottom like a giant labret stud to hole them in place. They come out of the skin about 1/4″, and since they’re still healing, I sometimes wear protective covering over them (you can see that in the third photo). They are rather hard to miss, and the day of the search, I was wearing longer posts than in these photos, making the jewelry somewhat the same size as 9mm bullets, so they were more prominent. Here are some photos that I took two days ago to update you on the healing.

Again I want to emphasize that the pinkish scarred up looking skin is not from the pocketings!!! It is because of the neurological damage resulting from surgery to remove a bone tumor in that leg. These modifications are there in part to “reclaim” my awful leg.

Anyway, these piercings were covered up with a sock but even the most casual touch would have made it seem like I had hidden an object under the sock — with the bandages included, an object as large as a box cutter. I was not looking forward to having to explain the pocketings, but to my great surprise, the agent (and it was a senior agent that did the pat down, not some noob) didn’t notice. He didn’t even touch my ankle or lower leg!!! I could have had a knife shoved in my sock and he’d never have noticed. To say nothing of being able to put anything else in my sock or on the bottom of my foot. I found it shocking, that even with them spending fifteen minutes searching me in a variety of ways, in the most aggressive search short of a strip-search, they were completely unable to find even the most obvious objects “hidden” on my body. I could easily have brought in a knife or even a zip gun.

The whole process is a joke. Not only are they wasting effort harassing people who are obviously not matching any reasonable terrorist profile, but the searches themselves are totally incompetent. Caitlin has accidentally brought a metal box cutter (ie. razor blade knife) in her purse. I have accidentally brought a composite automatic knife clipped into my pocket with the top of the knife actually sticking out of the pocket! And now I’ve been searched and had the objects in my sock missed. Why do they bother?

Oh and they also searched my stuff, and that process was also completely incompetent. Because we were going there for my daughter’s birthday, I had an entire bag full of wrapped presents in my carry-on, which didn’t bother them in the least, and when they did the aggressive search on the way back, they did only the most cursory check of my stuff. Mostly they just moved it all about and made a mess, but they missed stuff in the pockets and they didn’t take a close look at any of the electronics hardware. Again, a complete waste.

I did however break the shoelaces on my ancient shoes having to untie and tie them in a rush a few times. When we got home Caitlin bought me some new laces so I looked up different ways to lace shoes and had some fun with it. Here’s the style that I went with:

You can see it, right?

The plane we flew on was a little Beechcraft, the smallest plane I’ve ever taken on an international flight. I think it had 18 seats in all, and only sat two across. That is, a seat, the aisle, a seat. Everyone gets a window! It was a prop plane rather than a jet, but actually still felt really speedy and accelerated quickly on take-off. On each flight, both there and back, we went through stormy patches that were absolutely wild. I felt like I was in a fighter jet, not just because of the turbulence but because the pilots’ cockpit was open to the passenger area and it felt almost like being part of the grew, maybe the gunner.

Now to get to work… I have writer’s drawer’s block but I have to get a logo drawn for a friend’s restaurant. Gonna watch 90210 with Caitlin and maybe do some sculpting to clear my head, but ultimately I will just have to force myself and keep my fingers crossed that inspiration strikes.

I began this ring by sculpting a master skull ring design out of polymer clay by hand, based on a real human skull that I have here as a model. From this I made a two part silicone mold, into which I cast a tin/bismuth metal alloy (ie. a type of pewter). The ring was then removed from the mold and finished by hand, including drilling out the eye sockets to prepare them for the stones.

The greenish stones that you see in the eyes are where this ring gets especially special. I carved these cabochons by hand out of Libyan Desert Glass — also known as “great sand sea glass” — which is a gorgeous green glass found only in parts of the Libyan desert. It is about 26 million years old and was used by prehistoric man for tools, and later as jewelry, for example being found in the form of a scarab beetle that is the centrepiece for Tutankhamun’s pectoral jewelry. The glass is a specific type of tektite, formed by meteoric burtsts and impacts, that is, the great heat of a meteor from outer space striking the desert causes the sand to liquify into this new form, so in addition to the earthly elements from the sand, there are bits of the meteor as well which have travelled across the depths of space to be a part of this skull ring’s eyes. As far as I understand it, it gets its colour from melted zircon, which also shows that the stone was formed under colossal pressure and temperature. It is quite similar to Darwin glass or Moldavites if you are more familiar with those — they are all quite similar but source from different impact sites.

Anyway, after grinding these meteoric bits of glass into rough domes to fit the eye sockets, I mounted them from the inside of the ring and then welded the inside of the ring back together to trap the tektites inside the eyes. Then I ground the inside of the ring smooth again and polished the whole thing. The final step was to treat the ring with an antique patina, which blackens the metal and brings out the detail, especially after I gave it one last polish to accentuate the highlights.

The ring is currently sized to a 10 ¼ but by request I can increase the size to as large as a 12. If you need me to do that please specify it on the check-out.

Item link: http://www.etsy.com/listing/98949917/skull-ring-with-libyan-desert-glass

Don’t miss my “pay what you can” post below this one, it applies to all this.

Caitlin and I are out of town this weekend, heading down south for Nefarious’s birthday. Just a short visit as I have a doctor’s appointment that I have to zip back up here for at the start of the week, but I’m sure it will be nice nonetheless.

I have created a bunch of new coupon codes for my Etsy shop. You enter them at checkout if you want to use one (obviously I am very happy if you are able to afford to pay the regular full price). They are:

 5PERCENTOFF — Save 5%        10PERCENTOFF — Save 10%
15PERCENTOFF — Save 15%       20PERCENTOFF — Save 20%
25PERCENTOFF — Save 25%       30PERCENTOFF — Save 30%
35PERCENTOFF — Save 35%       40PERCENTOFF — Save 40%
45PERCENTOFF — Save 45%       50PERCENTOFF — Save 50%

If every single person chooses the maximum coupon I will probably reconsider the wisdom of this idea, but I will be truly surprised if that happens. I believe people will continue to support the shop fairly, but that it will mean that more people will be able to have access (so don’t feel bad if you do choose 50% off — I wouldn’t have included it if I didn’t want people to use it). I will report back in the future on how this idea works. Thanks again to everyone who has supported the shop so far.

Now, I also wanted to share what I made today, and I have to give credit to Caitlin who gave me the idea after seeing the last heterochromia ring I made — she told me I should make a David Bowie Ziggy Stardust inspired ring. So I present to you Ziggy Skulldust… or… Deaddy Stardust… or something…

You can click the pic to jump to my store and snag it before anyone else or just look at higher res pictures. It’s currently a size 7.5 so it fits smaller hands, and has two slightly different coloured gemstones. The inset lightning bolt is coloured with a permanent epoxy that I baked in place.

Blood Eye (Almandine Garnet) Skull Ring, Size 10

I should mention that the next two are, by request, in smaller women’s sizes:

Red/Gree Heterochromia Skull Ring, Size 7

Yellow Citrine Gemstone-Eye Skull Ring, Size 6 ½

Black Spinel-Eye Skull Ring, Size 12 ¼

I got the latest session of tattooing by Shane Faulkner done yesterday, the fill over the sky. Boy oh boy oh boy did it hurt over the knee. We actually did less than I’d hoped to because it was just too awful. But I do have an excuse which I will explain in a moment, but first, check it out. Be sure to zoom it in. I swear it gets better and better every single session. I’m so happy with how it’s turning out.

DO NOT RESIST ZOOMING IT IN!

So anyway. Yesterday morning I got a text from Shane asking me if I was ready to get tattooed, and I replied, “well, my tattoo appointment isn’t until tomorrow but if you want I can do today instead, I’m not busy” and he was like, “no, you’re booked for today and I have a client coming from Italy tomorrow so it’s today or we re-book…” I don’t know if I wrote it down wrong or if he did, but either way, when I’d walked out of his studio last time, I wrote down one date in my phone’d schedule and he wrote down a different one in his tattoo appointment book. But no big deal, I didn’t have anything pressing that day anyway.

Problem was, the night before when I was reading before bed, I noticed a couple times that I had stopped breathing. I don’t normally have apnea problems when I’m awake, but that night I was. Because it’s brain-related, not blockage-related, when I stop breathing, I just lose the “impulse” to breathe because my brain doesn’t notice the CO2 building up in my blood for some reason. I do start to feel faint or dizzy after a while but there’s no urge to inhale whatsoever. So I notice it, take a deep breathe, and there’s a certain sense of relief from the faintness, but it doesn’t come with the same “oh, thank you oxygen” rush that you might get after your first breathe after holding it for a while. Just nothing at all. It’s more than a little disconcerting, but it’s not as scary as I imagine it is to have some kinds of asthma or an allergic reaction where your throat closes or something else where you really want to breathe but can’t. Logically I know that I have to breathe to live, but there’s absolutely no subconscious desire or need to breathe. Anyway, I was scared that if I went to sleep that I wasn’t going to wake up, so I decided it might be best to just stay up all night and let it pass.

Problem with that is that I was incredibly tired when I went to get tattooed, which meant that none of my normal psychological pain coping mechanisms worked and parts of the tattoo, specifically the area around the knee, were brutally painful. We tried using spray and wipe anesthetics, which is basically lidocaine that soaks into the outline and numbs the surrounding skin, but because most of what we were doing was big filled areas with almost no outline, they didn’t really work. I feel bad because I wanted to do so much more — and I know that Shane wanted to do more as well — but I just wasn’t up to it and we quit after a bit over three hours of tattooing. That said, I am asbolutely thrilled with what we did do. Filling in the sky has made the tattoo feel so much bigger, so expansive, and given it a real feeling of depth and scale. Like I said, every single tattoo session I feel like this tattoo takes a big step forward and just keeps improving every single time. I don’t want to say it’s my favorite tattoo, because I really do love almost all my tattoos and think they are top notch pieces of art, but this one is definitely vying for the top of the podium.

Also in personal body modification news, I hand-machined a couple of test pieces of jewelry for my leg pocketings. I made one in a microdermal style (sort of like what I posted a blueprint for recently) and the other in a pocketing style, which is essentially a metal version of what I’m currently wearing in silicone. Here they are:

I tried popping in the pocketing one and to my great surprise it was immediately obvious that it was not going to be easy to do so without a fair amount of tissue trauma. The fisutla opening was not willing to casually stretch to accept to footing’s diameter, even though it’s actually smaller than what I’m currently wearing. The silicone that I’m using in my current jewelry is of a 20 Shore durometer, so that’s about the same as a soft squishy gel bicycle seat. A bit softer than the rubber in a rubber band. Anyway, it’s great for this you can make a relatively large footing, but when you’re inserting it, it squishes down completely and does not require the entrance hole to expand to accept it like you would for metal or glass or just about any other jewelery. To say nothing of the other advantages like impact resistance and weight. So to be honest, right now I am leaning toward continuing to use the silicone jewelry. I may however machine some nice metal decorative caps for it out of aluminum (which is extremely bio-inert even though you rarely see it in the body jewelry world).

Finally, I mentioned above that we tried anesthetic on my tattoo today and perhaps that perked up some ears, since I know that a lot of people would love a painless tattoo, even if they might be afraid to admit it out loud — I think there’s a real stigma against it. Anyway, a while back I got a handful of different tattoo anesthetics, and every time I’ve been tattooed we’ve tried different ones. Some have been junk and some have been extremely effective. Some time in the nearby future I will write a review of all the ones I’ve tried and share what I’ve discovered and my feelings on the subject.

There are more here on the official Man Conquers Space website.

I have opined here many times here about how sad it makes me that we did not grab ahold of the vision of Werner von Braun and Krafft Ehricke and other space engineers of the first part of the twentieth century and their very big dreams for the latter half. This movie asks the question of what kind of world we’d be living in if instead of pouring our money into a completely pointless nuclear arms escalation — a technology where the best thing we can say about it is that we never used it — we instead poured it into pushing humanity into the stars.

We had the science well underway to put space station up in the fifties. Moon bases up in the early sixties, and Mars bases up in the late sixties. Full colonization of Mars in the seventies. Terraforming of Mars in the eighties. Asteroid mining and bases on the Jovian moons in the nineties. A half billion humans living and working off the surface of the Earth by the turn of the millenium. And then on to the stars in this twenty-first century!

But instead we have mountains and mountains of useless and extremely expensive weapons stockpiled or already disposed of. Wastes of money where the best thing that we can hope for them is that they continue to be only wastes of money, not wastes of life as well. In a world of unbridled wealth, with enough resources and riches for every person to live in luxury we still have artificially created caste and class systems, artificially created scarcity, and completely fraudulent poverty and all the misery that comes with it. Looking at the way humans squander their intellectual gifts bringing misery to each other for tiny rewards of individual greed, it’s hard to be optimistic that we’ll ever conquer space, let alone our own vices and personal shortcomings.

That said, I am very excited for April 24th, not just because it’s both my brother’s and my daughter’s birthday, but because a mysterious company, controlled by various Google Execs, Space Entrepreneurs, James Cameron, and other forward thinkers, called “Planetary Resources” is making a “big announcement”. Word is that they’re going to be announcing the beginning of commercial asteroid mining, which I have to admit is very exciting. In one of my recent rocketry posts I mentioned that a few major mining corporations are realizing that mining the moon is starting to make financial sense… perhaps capitalism will succeed where previous dreamers have failed? Gosh I hope I get to live long enough to see it happen.

Then an Angel-style suicide suspension:

Then a lotus suspension:

And finally, a first time suicide suspension (the official photographer had left because it’s a women’s magazine):

Oh and click any of the pictures to also see lots more high res pictures!

Edit: I originally said this was tiger eye, oops, not at all — that’s striped cherry amber, sorry!

Skull Ring with Tiger Eye Cabochon Eyes

Robocop Ring Prototype

Brainiac Skull Ring with Orange CZ Gemstone Eyes

Skull Ring with Moonstone Cabochon Eyes

Metal Lego Minifig with Star Ruby Cabochon in Chest

Metal Lego Minifig with Embedded Natural Peridot Stone

Astrobaby Cosmonaut Ring

Jeez… I don’t think I even want to do any more typing, my fingers are miserable.

My favorite thing about these scans is that if you pay them $10 for the CD, you get to take home a copy to look at on your computer. When I got home and viewed the data, I almost had a heart attack when I saw a bunch of white bumps in the middle of my brain! Yikes! A tumor? Calcification? Doesn’t look good! But I did a little poking around and viewing other people’s scans online, and, whew, I’m quite certain that these are perfectly normal images of blood vessels that are supposed to be there. Feel free to scare me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that’s how things are supposed to look.

Oh, and you can see my earrings and stretched lobes in the scans, check it out:

Finally, I uploaded the whole thing to YouTube as well.

Oh and the IV injection of the contrast dye is a really neat feeling — intense warmth spreading through your body. As it collected in my pants, I had a moment of terror in which I thought I’d “wet the bed”. It’s a very strange sensation. They told me there might be a metal taste, but I don’t think I noticed any of that… The effect for the scanner only lasts a moment, so at the end of your scan (at least in my case), they hit you with the dye, you feel weird for a moment, they fire up the machine, and a couple seconds later you’re done. I didn’t know this, and had assumed that the with-contrast scanning would be the majority of what they were doing rather than just a reference frame (or something). So when the tech nurse came out almost immediately, I was quite confused and thought that perhaps I’d blacked out when she told me we were done. But no, I just didn’t know the schedule.

I did some jewelry work yesterday and pushed myself a little too hard and my hands are aching — I can hardly close my left hand, it’s like some whithered claw from a Gypsy curse or something. But I did make some great progress so after a little luck and a lotta pain coping I will finished off the pieces I was working on and will be posting them here and to Etsy later today, so check back if you have the time. I have a couple nice new items that I think people will quite like. Oh, and all the orders I had pending from the holiday sale went out in the mail yesterday if for some reason I missed emailing anyone to let them know.

We had a very nice week here, which is why I didn’t post last week. Tomorrow it’s “back to work” and I’ll be fulfilling Etsy orders (and I’m leaving that sale coupon running until then), and then on Thursday it’s back to the hospital for a CT scan of my noggin, but now let me update the ol’ diary. Because it was spring break for Nefarious’s school in Virginia (versus March Break in Canada last month) she was hear visiting, and the visit began with a trip to her grandmother’s to have an Easter Egg hunt and to see her cousins as well. During that time, Caitlin and I explored the county, going both to various beaches and parks (Little Bluff, Point Petre, Lake on the Mountain, Prince Edward Point, and so on), as well as checking out various funny antique shops (no we did not go “antiquing”, it was more looking at budget outsider-art galleries or something) and the likes. And I rooted my tablets (Acer Iconia 500 and 501), which was a great call because now I can mount all kinds of devices that I couldn’t before, such as large (64gig+) memory sticks and NTFS drives.

Tourist pictures of Caitlin and I:

We also saw a cool old diving pod:

And made rock men:

We did all sorts of stuff when we got back into Toronto, including a visit to the CN tower because I’d been promising Nefarious that I’d take her up to the very top. I’d never been to the Skypod, and neither had she — we’ve just been to the large main section. The Skypod is actually 33 stories higher, which makes a remarkable difference. When you look down, the main section might as well be on the ground, and if it were not for the Skydome putting it to scale, you’d think it was — that’s how much higher it seems!

It also has some cool pod windows on the lower story, and then normal large windwos up on the main level… The pods are actually cooler because they make you feel like you’re in a hovering spaceship coming in for a landing or some kind of airship or something.

I did notice however that in nearly every picture I appear to have grown finger-shaped bunny ears.

Might need to see a doctor about that. As if I don’t have enough reasons.

We also went to the Wizard World ComicCon, where Nefarious had lots of sword fights and had way too much fun shooting a stormtrooper for charity ($5 to the Make-A-Wish foundation if I remember right). It’s actually the first Con I’ve been to, which may come as a surprise, and I’ve got to say that the signature area, where various celebrities are there for pictures and signing, is really depressing. Dean Stockwell was stuck between Jeri Ryan and Scott Bakula, both of whom had long lines, while he had no one and looked very, very sad and awkward. It was quite depressing and I didn’t like looking at the scene. We were there early though.

I bumped into a BME friend there too which is always very nice.

Oh, there’s a lot more I could post but after two other long entries — and no sleep since Saturday night because of my “sleep deprived EEG” this morning, I’m rather wiped out and don’t want to do any more. So let me leave off with the odd metal ice-shield at Point Petre that always makes me fantasize that there’s a strange underground base there for Nazi U-Boats or something. It is after all linked to a massive no-trespassing Department of Defense monitoring station of some sort. I wanted to check it out but it had a big fence around it and no-trespassing signs.

Bedtime can’t come soon enough!!!

Without further ado, here are three pictures as of last night. The bottom two are glow in the dark silicone, and the top one is just regular silicone, cast by me. It’s not technically implant grade, but it is FDA approved for food use. Of course, using it on myself is ethically very different from using it on others, so I am fine with that rating. Not for the squeamish!

As you can see I am still perfecting the placement of the top two and the angles need a little work. I’ve found that there is a little room to play there, and my using a very slight pressure bandage nudging them over I can get them to move enough to be in alignment with each other — I know it works because I did it with the bottom one. Here is a photo of how I do that by using bandages to “push” them into place.

I’m still debating what the best jewelery is. For short term and healing, I like this silicone stuff a lot, and it’s also nice because it can be banged without causing damage. It can also be removed and replaced easily to inspect the healing, and I suppose I could also easily make pressure fit caps for it if I wanted something decorative. However, I am also debating something very close to 2ga microdermals (anyone able to manufacture these, as I don’t have a jeweller’s lathe?). The reason I am considering that is I like the idea of wearing flesh tunnels that create a negative space inside my leg. Here is a picture of what I have right now, and what I’m thinking about:

The obvious problem with that jewelry is that it would be semi-permanent since like a microdermal, it would become anchored in place. That’s both a problem and an advantage for obvious reasons, but knowing me, once I have what I like, I won’t be swapping the jewelry out.

Finally, in my first entry about this I briefly mentioned the procedure, but now that I’ve done it twice more I feel confident that it worked well for me so I am going to describe it in full. Again, this isn’t for the squeamish and I wouldn’t suggest this to anyone who is not very in tune with their bodies and experienced with the safe limits of procedures as well as experienced with identifying infection and other problems, because this definitely plays close to the edge.

I begin by using a #11 scalpel to make an incision perpendicular to the skin, straight down into the tissue to about a 1/2″ depth. This is replaced with a sliver or spike of carved wood or bamboo (for example out of a disposable chopstick) about 5/8″ to 3/4″ long and roughly 8ga or maybe a little larger in diameter with a dull edge or point on the end. This is pushed into the hole and held in place with a light pressure dressing which will cause it to settle at a comfortable depth. It should not be particularly painful. In a way this is similar to indigenous body piercing methods. I believe the reason it works is that your body’s defenses react to the wood, a non-inert organic material, and begin a process of pulling away from it and building up a protective layer around it with safe natural discharge that acts as lube — this is not the same as pus from an infection although, especially mixed with a little blood, it may seem that way. It’s how your body responds to threats such as slivers. Within 12 to 24 hours this can be replaced with a slightly larger silicone plug of the same general design. I used a fairly hard formulation for this initial phase, but it’s still much softer than the wood which I feel is important so as not to do damage to the subcutaneous tissue. It should only take two to three steps of progressively larger diameter jewelry to reach the final 1/4″ size (and I don’t see why a little larger wouldn’t work if you want). There may be quite a lot of discharge during the first 48 hours, and there may be some minor discomfort and heat in the area but nothing major and I experienced no indications of infection or other complication. After the initial period it will lymph for a couple weeks and then settle down. Oh, and when I’m at the final jewelry size, I made a hard silicone version of the jewelry to “shape” the hole, and then replace it a day later with a soft silicone version, since the softer the jewelry, the less impact it has on the surrounding tissue. Finally, minor adjustments in terms of the angle of jewelry can be made using pressure dressings as I showed in the linked picture above.

Just want to be real clear that this was not a “how-to”! If you’re ready to do something this perverse to your body, you don’t need my instructions anyway.

Hope this is of interest to someone. I will continue to update on this project when relevant.